Thursday Note 14th March 2019

March 19th, 2019

Dear Parents/Guardians,

We hope you are well this week as we head towards St. Patrick’s Day. Our news this week is as follows

  • The Board of Management of St. Tola’s N.S. completed its annual review of the Child’s Safeguarding Statement at the Board meeting of Tuesday 12th March. The review was conducted in accordance with the “Checklist for Review of the Child Safeguarding Statement “ published on the Department’s website www.education.ie.

  • To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day we are holding a Lá Glas (Green Day)  today. Thank you to all pupils who wore an item of green clothing to school today. It was great to see such varied green items.  Thank you for all donations to the school.
  • We have now completed our Aldi challenge and have reached 300 stickers. Thank you to all parents who collected the stickers for us. We will send our entry off today and fingers crossed we may be lucky! As we have a surplus of stickers we have applied for a second poster and will try our best to fill this as well with stickers before the closing date of 7th April!
  • Best of luck to both our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. They will participate in the Marian Keane basketball competition next Wednesday in Shannon Leisure Centre. The pupils have been training regularly at lunchtime and thank you to Ms. Fitzsimons and Ms. Vaughan for giving up their lunchtime to coach them.
  •  Seachtain na Gaeilge celebrations continued this week.  Yesterday all classes and teachers took part in a dance to An Dreoilin.  We were lucky that Mr Custy was in the school and he  played the fiddle for the performance. Today we had a wonderful Cruinniu Gaelach. All classes did a song/dance/play as Gaeilge for the school. All performances were great and it was lovely to see the pupils using their Gaeilge. This afternoon pupils from 1st-6th class will take part in a Trath na gCeist (Quiz in Irish). Each team will have a pupil from each class with the class teachers supplying the quiz questions for them.
  • We have organised an Internet Safety talk for parents of ALL pupils in St. Tola’s. This will take place here in the school on Tuesday March 26th at 7.30p.m.  Dr. Maureen Griffin is a forensic psychologist specialising in the area of online offending. Through her work she came to realise the importance of working with children to give them tools to keep them safe while online and also to support  those who care for children. More details will follow on this talk next week but we hope that at least one parent/guardian for each child in the school will be able to attend this workshop. There will be no cost for the workshop.
  • St. Tola’s is closed for pupils tomorrow Friday 15th March and Monday 18th March for St. Patrick’s day.  The school will re-open on Tuesday next at 9a.m. We hope you all have a lovely weekend.  Beannachtai na feile Padraig oraibh go leir.

Kind regards,

Mary Dunlea Fitzgerald, Principal